and emotional elements of human life is very common in religious
thought. It is not often, indeed, that either the worth of love, or the
weakness of knowledge receives such emphatic expression as that which is
given to them by the poet; but the same general idea of their relation
is often expressed, and still more often implied. Browning differs from
our ordinary teachers mainly in the boldness of his affirmatives and
negatives. They, too, regard the intellect as merely human, and the
emotion of love as divine. They, too, shrink from identifying the reason
of man with the reason of God; even though they may recognize that
morality and religion must postulate some kind of unity between God and
man. They, too, conceive that human knowledge differs _in nature_ from
that of God, while they maintain that human goodness is the same in
nature with that of God, though different in degree and fulness. There
are two _kinds_ of knowledge, but there is only one kind of justice, or
mercy, or loving-kindness. Man must be content with a semblance of a
knowledge of truth; but a semblance of goodness, would be intolerable.
God really reveals Himself to man in morality and religion, and He
communicates to man nothing less than "the divine love." But there is no
such close connection on the side of reason. The religious life of man
is a divine principle, the indwelling of God in him; but there is a
final and fatal defect in man's knowledge. The divine love's
manifestation of itself is ever incomplete, it is true, even in the best
of men; but there is no defect in its nature.

As a consequence of this doctrine, few religious opinions are more
common at the present day, than that it is necessary to appeal, on all
the high concerns of man's moral and religious life, from the intellect
to the heart. Where we cannot know, we may still feel; and the religious
man may have, in his own feeling of the divine, a more intimate
conviction of the reality of that in which he trusts, than could be